At 10:32 AM 10/24/01 -0700, Tim May wrote:
On Wednesday, October 24, 2001, at 10:14 AM, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
On Wed, 24 Oct 2001, David Honig wrote:
Enough rads to sterilize? Forget film.
What do you suppose happens to disks and other magnetic media at these flux levels?
Nothing. Magnetic oxides and metallic thin films are not affected by mere few tens of kilorads, or even by megarads.
Ionizing radiation has no particular first order effect on such films.
Um, Tim, I was talking about silver-halogen photographic 'films'. You do raise the question of what happens to 100-atom thick gate oxides... but that's not what *I* was writing about. Radiation can also change the color of gems --used to 'cheat' and make them more valuable--- but probably not a lot of diamonds go through the USPO, and I don't know what dosage is necessary to introduce the appropriate defect density.